


perfect girl revolution

by yoonbot (iverins)



Category: TWICE (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Complicated Relationships, F/F, Friends to Lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-14
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2021-03-03 18:36:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24720124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iverins/pseuds/yoonbot
Summary: In which Im Nayeon is determined to become Yoo Jeongyeon's ideal type.
Relationships: Im Nayeon/Yoo Jeongyeon
Comments: 14
Kudos: 142
Collections: Girl Group Jukebox (Round 2)





	perfect girl revolution

**Author's Note:**

> Written for GG Jukebox Round 2, inspired by Delicate by Taylor Swift
> 
> there are two wolves inside of you. one is saying "what about that itzy fic you were going to write?" the other says "how about we write this pairing that you've thought about maybe twice." you are a week past the deadline.
> 
> thank you mods for your endless patience and for hosting another round of ggjb! ♡♡♡
> 
> **[EDIT 06/16][here's](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7CbO3ki52oSS9FH0jmO1dP?si=EflOn9p2Qey9MIKivkZfnw) the playlist of songs that helped inspire the fic!**

Break my heart once, shame on you. Break my heart twice, shame on me.

\-- A WELL-KNOWN APHORISM, REPURPOSED

On Tuesday, Nayeon asks Younghyun out for coffee. To put it plainly, they'd called it quits between them for good a little more than a month ago after a long back and forth of _will they won't they_ graciously played by their shared friend group, also after a long history of them breaking up and getting back together that had dragged on for the better of a year and a half. For their own dignity – and to discourage that history from repeating itself again – they'd temporarily divvied up their mutual friends into his and hers this time, which was surprisingly foolproof until Nayeon found herself on the same team as Yoon Dowoon, who'd she'd spoken to maybe five times out of the six years she'd known him, at the monthly game night she'd finally drawn the lot to host.

"I think we ended up with the wrong friends," Nayeon blurts just as Younghyun sits down across from her with his iced Americano. Her own latte's gone cold in its to-go cup that she belatedly realizes she'd chosen in bad taste.

Younghyun bites the plastic straw of his own coffee. When they were still together, he used to nonchalantly offer her a sip of his drink by tilting the cup over to her, and it used to drive Nayeon crazy to see the straw bitten down. "What do you mean by that?" he asks.

"Like, how did I end up playing Super Smash Bros with _Dowoon_ when you get Sungjin and Jeongyeon for karaoke night?" Nayeon points out. "Weren't you the one who adopted Dowoon in the first place? Jeongyeon's my best friend, you know!" She'd also responded to Nayeon's enthusiastic game night invitation with an _ah, sorry, I have a company dinner :(,_ which Nayeon originally gave her a pass for because of 1) the emoji, and 2) she was trying very hard not to be clingy, which Jeongyeon always complained she was. A week later, she'd seen Jeongyeon in Jaebum's – who they'd both designated as a neutral party, on the clause that 1) he and Younghyun had been friends since primary school and 2) he was Nayeon's older brother – Instagram story, screaming along to a popular OST song of a recent drama Nayeon hated. And, dejectedly drinking a beer alone in her kitchen, _that_ was when Nayeon realized she'd gotten the short end of the stick on this supposed bargain of theirs. “It’s not fair! You can’t _have_ her.”

“Nayeon,” Younghyun sighs, sounding like he’s trying very hard to be serious when there’s an amused smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. Back when Nayeon first gushed every gory detail to Jeongyeon about he’d asked her out during her first year of university, Jeongyeon had waited until she was finished to ask _no offense or anything, but haven’t you ever thought that Younghyun was a little annoying?_ She didn’t get it then with her rose-tinted glasses in the way, even if she knew that Jeongyeon’s opinion had to be somewhat valid since they’d all known each other since middle school. Now, Nayeon’s starting to understand where she was coming from. “I’m not gonna stop you from seeing your best friend of eighteen years just because we broke up.” He's infuriatingly sincere.

“I, um – oh,” manages Nayeon through her brain short-circuiting. She just – “Thought we said it’d be better if we didn’t run into each other for a bit?”

The grin breaks across Younghyun’s face then. “Frankly,” he shakes his head, and Nayeon absentmindedly wonders if he’s still in love with her, and if she’d done wrong to call him out like this in her all-encompassing ridiculousness that he probably shouldn’t have always indulged but did anyway, “I don’t think you can go that long without talking to her.”

And that’s how it is. There’s a _read_ notification next to the last message Nayeon sent thirteen days ago and what feels like a hundred times in between that of her thumb hovering over the call button, only to remember the time Jeongyeon looked at her seriously as they sat half-drunk in the backseat of a taxi not long after they’d both graduated, and asked, “If I moved across the world from you, what would you do?” And when Nayeon simply swore that she’d follow her there, Jeongyeon turned her gaze out the tinted window, the occasional street light they passed by illuminating half her face in a muted yellow, as if that were precisely the wrong answer.

“Do you think Jeongyeon’s been avoiding me?” she suddenly concludes, only because she knows Younghyun will try to answer.

In response, Younghyun looks at her like he’s still mostly in love with her. For the past year, she’d felt bad every time about breaking his heart more than her own and Jeongyeon would tell her – “Why would she be avoiding you?” he asks. And _oh,_ Nayeon gets it now.

Nayeon’s gotten into the habit over the years of measuring her life events from Jeongyeon's hair, and then going backwards. Like: Jeongyeon first cut her hair to her neck right around the time Nayeon finally lost her last baby tooth, and that was when she was in fourth grade and Jeongyeon was in third. She'd started growing it out again once Nayeon had started middle school, and they'd walk from their apartment complex together with Nayeon's brother to the bus stop, eating their breakfast in sandwich bags while waiting. It'd been long enough to braid by the time Nayeon experienced her first heartbreak, and Jeongyeon had supplied her wordlessly with elastics other than an _Im Nayeon, don’t you dare get snot into my hair,_ even when she tugged a little too hard. And – after years of letting it fall past her shoulders – Jeongyeon had cut it to her chin again right around the first time Nayeon and Younghyun broke up. Nayeon knows this because she'd buried her face into her neck as they watched _The Notebook_ and felt the ends of it tickling her cheek while soaking the shoulder of Jeongyeon's t-shirt with her tears.

Maybe a week after that, Nayeon was sprawled out on her stomach on Jeongyeon’s couch after showing up to her door unannounced with two bags full of take-out. “Honestly, isn’t it his loss?” she mused aloud while Jeongyeon was finishing up the _kimchi jjigae_ she’d started cooking long before Nayeon rang her doorbell. “I have so much love to give. Don’t you think I’m kind of just this endless fountain of love?”

She heard Jeongyeon sigh over the clink of two bowls she’d placed down on the table. By that point, Nayeon had been wallowing so badly that she was even tired of hearing her own voice, but Jeongyeon hadn’t closed the door on her despite that. She reached over for the forgotten half-used tissue sitting beside Nayeon’s elbow. “Sure,” she allowed, reaching over to wipe Nayeon’s running nose with it roughly. Her fingers smelled faintly of scallions. “But you have to be careful about who you give it to.”

She ended up outside Jeongyeon’s door four more times after that for the exact same reason, and with the exact same take-out order. And every time, Jeongyeon took stock of Nayeon’s puffy eyes and the oversized Toronto Maple Leafs jersey that she’d stolen from Younghyun when they’d first gotten together, rolled her eyes, and let her in.

“Why do you like him so much?” Jeongyeon asked her once. Three months ago and somewhat harshly, when Nayeon had broken it off the time before the last. “I don’t know why you guys keep going back and forth like this.”

Nayeon looked up at the ceiling, thoughtful. A long time ago, she’d thought of Younghyun as some bootlegged version of her first love – Park Jinyoung, Jaebum's best friend growing up. He'd accidentally let it slip during Nayeon's second year of high school, and, as a direct result, Jinyoung stopped coming around on weekends. It's one of the many bargaining chips Nayeon uses against him to this day – which she would never admit to anyone. Truthfully, the only reason they’d fallen back together every time was because Younghyun was specifically the type of lovesick fool that fell head first, off the deep end kinds of in love and Nayeon was a sucker for that knowing-how-the-movie-ended-before-you-watched-it kind of familiarity.

She pressed her lips together, knowing that this answer was something Jeongyeon would judge her for. “It’s complicated,” she tried, sitting up suddenly before reaching for a pair of disposable chopsticks.

Jeongyeon looked at her funny over her own bowl of _jjajangmyeon,_ like she expected Nayeon to cave and say more. But she didn’t want – “You wouldn’t get it,” supplied Nayeon with a close-lipped smile, intending for it to come out kind but sounding rather defensive instead.

After a beat of silence, Jeongyeon agreed. “No, you’re right.” She snapped her own chopsticks apart and Nayeon, for some reason, felt utterly defeated in a battle she didn’t realize she’d been fighting until right then. “I guess I don’t.”

According to Jeongyeon, Nayeon first walked up to her when she was skipping rope in the parking lot of their apartment complex. She and her mom had just come back from the grocery store and Nayeon offered her a Melona bar softened from the fifteen minute drive in the trunk with a rabbit-toothed smile, her own half-eaten and dripping over the pavement. She'd been seven then, and Nayeon eight.

In actuality, Nayeon's pretty sure that they'd first met a few weeks prior to that, when Jeongyeon and her family were taking measurements of their new apartment, two floors up from where Nayeon's family lived. "Oh," is what Jeongyeon always said whenever Nayeon corrected her. "Well, I used to think I didn't need any friends other than my sister, so I probably didn't pay much attention to you then."

"Yoo Jeongyeon," Nayeon would point out, "Are you saying that if I hadn't bribed you with Melona, you wouldn't have stuck with me for all these years?"

To which Jeongyeon would retort, "Who's really stuck to who now?" She'd only laugh when Nayeon punched her weakly in the shoulder, open-mouthed and like she was in pain, more so the funnier she found something. Nayeon, for that matter, loved that laugh.

On Friday, Nayeon drives her parent's hand-me-down car to work, leaves early, and parks obnoxiously right outside Jeongyeon's office building where she works a clerical job. A year ago, when she'd first landed the position after months of post-grad job searching, Nayeon blew her paycheck on this brand-name wallet Jeongyeon definitely didn't need as a congratulations gift.

"You should return it," Jeongyeon told her once they'd separated from the rest of their friends outside the restaurant, her breath forming small wisps in the cold night air. "I really don't have a use for it."

Nayeon put the fancy thick-papered bag back into her gloved hand. "That's why it's a present." She and Younghyun had gotten back together not long before then, and he'd been leaning against the hood of his car, illegally parked along the side of the street with the hazard lights on in the distance. "Aren't all presents supposed to be a little bit useless? That’s why you don’t buy them yourself."

Jeongyeon narrowed her eyes. "I'm gonna tell your mom that you spent this much money in one go."

"You _wouldn't."_ But Nayeon knows that Jeongyeon keeps that wallet safely zipped in the innermost pocket of her shoulder bag, irrationally afraid that she’ll misplace it otherwise.

"Yoo Jeongyeon!" Nayeon calls out the rolled-down window when she sees her walk out the glass doors, flanked by a few of her co-workers. She pulls her seat back upright until it's leaning toward the steering wheel as she waves animatedly. "Over here!"

She watches as Jeongyeon sighs and pulls away from her work friends after saying goodbye, almost in slow motion. She rounds over to the passenger door, checking for oncoming traffic before stepping in and slamming it closed. The inside of Nayeon's 2000 Hyundai Sonata is deafening in the aftermath, a stifling vacuum where she’s forced to come to terms with another one of her _could use some more thought_ decisions.

Jeongyeon waits until Nayeon's turned on the blinker to say anything. "You could've warned me that you were dropping by." Her right hand's curled around the handlebar above the window. "I would've brought the tupperware I borrowed from you ages ago."

Nayeon honks at a car that sped by just as she was about to switch lanes. It took five months after she'd gotten her license before Jeongyeon dared to step into her car, on the grounds that _Nayeon, I've seen you play Mario Kart like it's bumper cars._ She still hasn't told Jeongyeon about the small fender bender she'd gotten into during that mock trial period. "Well," Nayeon grumbles once she's safely in the flow of traffic. "You've been avoiding me so I thought it'd be better this way."

Jeongyeon turns to look at her, mouth pressed into a line. "I've been busy. Haven't you?"

Nayeon shrugs and cruises through a yellow light. "You went to karaoke with Jaebum and Sungjin."

"That was the one day I wasn't working overtime." Jeongyeon slips her tote bag off her shoulder belatedly and places it on the floor before her feet. She tucks a strand of her hair behind the ear that's facing Nayeon and exhales. "You know, if you'd called me that night, I would've hung out with you instead."

"Oh," Nayeon says, feeling dumb. "Really?"

Jeongyeon laughs out of her nose. "Really," she confirms. "Your brother is _way_ too competitive. Honestly, me and Jihyo just went to get drunk."

Nayeon scoffs before cussing at almost missing a left turn. "And you guys didn't invite me?"

"Well," Jeongyeon starts purposefully. "Younghyun was there." And Nayeon feels stupid all over again for forgetting. She can see Jeongyeon facing her out of her peripherals. "If it makes you feel better, he sang, like, every depressing break-up ballad until BamBam and Jimin booed him off."

It doesn't actually, but Nayeon would also rather not talk about it. Jeongyeon misinterprets her bitten-lip silence as – "Have you talked to him again since you ended things?"

"I – we’re not – " The words feel stuck in her throat out of desperation of wanting Jeongyeon to know. “Younghyun and I aren’t getting back together this time,” she confesses in a rush.

Nayeon feels the weight of Jeongyeon’s gaze against her cheek as they enter a tunnel. She flicks on her headlights as a heavy kind of quiet settles over them and the coffee-stained back seats. “Hmm,” Jeongyeon hums, sounding every bit like she doesn’t believe her.

“I’m serious!” insists Nayeon with a defiant tilt of her chin. “I mean – do you remember that time in middle school when I dragged you along to the pool because I wanted to catch Jaebum doing something I could tattle to my mom about?”

Jeongyeon frowns. “Not really.” The late October sun sits atop the purple horizon cut up by the residential apartment buildings surrounding Jeongyeon’s. Nayeon slows down until a pair of joggers in matching neon shirts overtakes them. “What does that have to do with anything?”

Nayeon deflates with a sigh. “I don’t know.” She pulls over right in front of the gate of Jeongyeon’s apartment and puts the car in neutral. “I just thought about it.”

Jeongyeon manually unlocks the passenger side door, but makes no move to get out of the car. “It backfired because you fell into the deep end when you weren’t being careful.” Nayeon turns to look at her, startled, and Jeongyeon’s squinting her eyes at the sunset through the windshield. “And I screamed for help, and Younghyun helped pull you out of the water. And that’s when you said you thought you could fall in love with him.” She faces Nayeon, her hair bunching up against the headrest. “Was that why you brought it up?”

Nayeon feels her heart pounding in her fingertips, where she’s still gripping the steering wheel. “I thought you said you didn’t remember.”

“I didn’t until you reminded me about it.”

“Oh.” Nayeon chews on her bottom lip, not sure whether to feel disappointed or vindicated by that. “Well, I was just thinking about how you were a really cute kid all of a sudden. I didn’t think you liked me all that much until I saw you bawling over me, thinking that I died.”

Jeongyeon snorts and unbuckles her seatbelt. “Says the ugliest crier,” she laughs. Nayeon leans over the gearshift to headbutt her out of the car.

“Anyway,” she says as Jeongyeon lingers with the door open, slinging her tote bag back over her shoulder. The strap catches the ends of her grown-out hair, the last bits of sunlight making the dyed strands glow like golden thread. “Me and Younghyun broke up this time, for real.”

Jeongyeon pauses, staring at a spot beyond Nayeon’s shoulder. “Okay,” she replies a little too easily. “Don’t come crying to me if you change your mind, then.”

Devastatingly enough, they both know that she’d take Nayeon in even if she did. She waves after closing the door and once again before she disappears into her apartment complex, and Nayeon just stares after her with her chin on the steering wheel, wondering where exactly to go from here.

An addendum to Nayeon's significant life events, measured by the length of Jeongyeon's hair –

It was long, and the wind blew it around her like a storm as Nayeon stood across from her with an armful of flowers from her high school graduation over by the school gates. They'd been standing by the huge cherry blossom tree that had bloomed only dismally for the preceding two years, but rained petals down on them then, loosened by the breeze.

"Yoo Jeongyeon," Nayeon had said over the rush of car passing by on the main road beside them after clearing her throat. "Go steady with me."

Jeongyeon blinked at her very seriously. The world went completely still for a brief rip in time, and then –

"No." And by the time Jeongyeon started university too, they'd acted like it never even happened.

If there’s any useless skill Nayeon possesses, it’s that she’s very good at leading people to believe things about her. The only caveat to this has to be the fact that Jeongyeon’s acquired some sort of x-ray Nayeon vision that always pinpoints her bluff, precisely when she least wants to be transparent.

Jeongyeon sidles up to where she’s sitting on Jihyo’s balcony, dangling her sneakers over the gaps between the wrought iron rail. She places a sweating bottle of beer next to Nayeon’s left hand before taking the space beside her. “I didn’t think you meant it,” she says, sounding vaguely apologetic.

Nayeon draws her legs into herself. The night air’s cold against her cheeks that have warmed from the drinks she’d had. “Meant what?”

“You and Younghyun not getting back together,” Jeongyeon specifies. Which is how Nayeon ended up on this balcony alone in the first place, thinking about how easy it’d be to fall back into old patterns again. Honestly, Younghyun had been very good at being her boyfriend. He’d do completely unnecessary things like drive her to work in the mornings unannounced, and running into him in the kitchen unexpectedly this time reminded her of how simple it’d been, knowing exactly how you loved and were being loved in return. “I didn’t think you were serious.”

Nayeon uncaps her beer with cold-bitten fingers. “Didn’t you know that, Yoo Jeongyeon?” she drawls, feeling a little bit tipsy and not at all brave. “I mean everything I say.”

“No, you don’t,” Jeongyeon counters. She takes a swig of her own beer, a neon 24-hour convenience store sign catching in the reflection of the glass. Her jean-covered thigh brushes against Nayeon’s, and Nayeon thinks about just how long she’s stupidly wanted this girl to be more than her best friend. “Remember the day of your high school graduation?”

Nayeon pulls her knee away from Jeongyeon’s, in tandem with the quickening of her heart beat. “What about it?”

Jeongyeon laughs that painful-sounding laugh over the distant sound of traffic. “You asked me to be with you. Like, _really_ be with you.” When she turns to face Nayeon, there’s a smile on her lips that doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “Surely, you didn’t mean that.”

“I – " Nayeon flattens her sweaty palms against her slacks. She closes her eyes and thinks about the cherry blossoms, caught in between the strands of Jeongyeon's dark hair all those years ago. "Would your answer have changed if I did?"

Jeongyeon's gaze turns weary. "I don't know," she replies, voice shaking. She bunches up her shoulders and draws her coat tighter around herself. "It was a long time ago, and you didn't mean it anyway."

Nayeon feels her cheeks burn. Nayeon feels like her heart's beating in her head and outside the physical limitations of her body all at once, in the hands of the girl who she's been orbiting circles around for years. Nayeon feels – "I just need to know if I have a chance," she blurts.

Jeongyeon looks at her in a way Nayeon's never seen her look at her before. It reminds her of falling into the deep end that time back when they were in middle school, the imagined memory of Jeongyeon's face above the rippling chlorine-blue water staring back at her in concern. That was when Nayeon fell in love with –

Her voice comes out thickly when she asks, "A chance at what, Nayeon?"

After Jeongyeon made sure she'd reached her apartment without passing out, and after throwing up into her toilet, Nayeon drunkenly called her from where she was sitting on her own bathroom floor.

"Are you mad that I said I'd follow you across the world, even if you tried to run away from me?" she said in lieu of greeting as soon as Jeongyeon picked up the phone.

The static over the line crackled. Nayeon envisioned the far-away look in Jeongyeon's eyes as she'd stared out the taxi window, pointedly not looking at her. "Why would I be mad?"

Nayeon rubbed a hand over her forehead. "I just – you, you don't like stuff like that, don't you?"

Jeongyeon laughed. "I didn't think those things mattered to you."

"Of course they do!" Nayeon groaned, leaning against her toilet cover. "Sorry," she said, suddenly painfully aware of how drunk she sounded. "I'll stop since it bothers you."

"It's okay," reassured Jeongyeon. Out of fear that she'd lose hold of this moment forever, Nayeon pressed her phone closer to her ear, hoping that would make it sound as if Jeongyeon was sitting beside her. "It's always been okay because it's you."

In the early winter after her twenty-sixth birthday, when Jeongyeon's hair falls just past her shoulders, Nayeon grins and decides to take a leap.

She looks up from her lap and says this sincerely: "A chance at you."


End file.
